


Where the Light Won't Find You

by eirabach



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, Brennan Jones is a terrible human being, F/M, Gen, The Blue Fairy is shady af, headcanon fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-29
Packaged: 2018-08-17 05:38:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8132416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eirabach/pseuds/eirabach
Summary: "Davy Jones, according to sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is often seen in various shapes, perching among the rigging on the eve of hurricanes:, ship-wrecks, and other disasters to which sea-faring life is exposed, warning the devoted wretch of death and woe." - Tobias Smollett.
But nothing is ever entirely what it seems, is it?





	1. Where the Light Won't Find You

**Author's Note:**

> This is a Mama Jones headcanon fic, previously posted, in part, in my compilation 'All the Small Things' here on ao3 and on tumblr. This chapter is a wee prologue, hope it interests you enough to stick with it!

Davina Jones stands and sways, Reul Ghorm preventing her escape with a magical barrier she’s powerless to cross and watching her with small, shrewd eyes.

“You knew this day would come,” says the ancient one, her fingers tight around the wood of her stolen wand, a cursed wedding ring hanging from the tip, “you have broken all the laws…”

“I have broken no laws,” she half spits, “I fell in love.”

“You abandoned your post,” sniffs Ghorm, “betrayed your people. He understands that now.”

Brennan. Brennan who had tempted her from the sea with his promises, his lies. She can still remember the cold thrill of wind against flesh, the prick of the pebbles against unsteady feet, the sudden all-consuming rush of yes and him, and swallows hard against the tears she won’t allow herself to shed.

“I am the one betrayed. You have my wand,” she lifts her chin in the air, “my love is false, paid off with your words and your bribes. Why must you banish me, also? Why punish my sons for my sins? If indeed it is a sin to be happy, _sister_.”

Ghorm has the grace to look down, a frisson of something like shame crossing her otherwise carefully blank expression.

“You should never have left, Davy.”

She closes her eyes for a moment, allows herself to think of the happiest times; hours spent pouring over books where the strange shapes ran together until one day they became words, and he lifted her off of her feet and span her until she was wild with laughter and dizzy with love. Kisses and promises by the crackling fire, his pride and love for her burning hotter than any flame.  Her delight when their sons bore her eyes and his dark good looks. The brilliant, terrible fury with which she had loved them, still loved them, for all the good it did anybody, in the end.

But that had been before the war had come to them, and war changes many things. Men, she knows, are not exempt. She ought to have realised, gods know enough people have tried to tell her, and perhaps their bitter tirades and spittle-laced barbs were a sort of dark kindness. You are what you are, they’d told her, blood will out.  He’d scoffed at them and she’d believed him. What was fate, what was nature, compared to true love?

Now she’s only scoffing at herself. She wonders what he was offered to turn her in. What magic he wanted that she couldn’t give him. Does he know what he’s unleashed by sending her back?

He’s a sailor, he knows what she ran from.

Maybe he never believed her, after all.

Maybe she’ll ask him, find out the truth before she drags him away. Before she watches him swallowed by salt and silt.

Maybe she’ll laugh. She hopes she can learn to hate him enough to laugh.

The wind she had once found so exciting bites at her cheeks as her bare toes dig for footholds on the grassy edge. Below her the grey ocean swirls, behind her she can hear somebody scrambling down the hill towards her, their voice a high, reedy cry that is carried away before she can make it out.

_Liam._

Her broken heart thumps once. Twice.

_Killian._

One breath. In. Out.

“I won’t forgive this,” she swears.

Ghorm seems to barely resist the urge to roll her eyes, and Davina wonders if she’s close enough to the ocean’s power to pull her sister’s flesh from her bones with her bare hands, “You’ll be better where you belong. It’s the way things should be.”

There’s another cry, closer now, so close it sounds like Mama, and she thinks it must be Liam. Liam her brave, darling boy. Will he know what his father has done? Will he remember her, when she’s nothing but the crest of a wave and a tale to fill grown men with dread? And Killian. He’s barely more than a baby, and yet so full of life and love, with the world laid out like a golden blanket at his feet.

He won’t remember her at all.

“They won’t forgive this.”

Reul Ghorm smiles, and it turns the sea water in her veins to ice.

“They’ll never know.”

The smallest push, and as she falls, down, down, down to become one with the breakers, she thinks that never is a very long time.

* * *

 

It’s years till she makes it back. Decades until there’s solid ground under her feet again. Centuries.

In a way it’s worse than never making it back at all.

The people and places she knew are long gone, eroded by the tides she cannot control. The clifftop house nothing but a tumbledown shack, Brennan long gone from this world, and her children -

Oh, her children.

She’d welcomed Liam into the arms of the ocean, wept over his shroud as the fishes had mouthed at his remains, but she’d never found Killian. Not ever. The sea had never taken her boy with oceans in his eyes.

It gives her hope that she might see those eyes staring from some wizened old face. Hope that it wasn’t all for nought in the end. A legacy, of sorts. So she wanders the streets of the land she doesn’t recognize, like a mourner years too late to a funeral, and she looks.

She’s not expecting what she finds.

* * *

 

They call it a sleeping curse. It looks like death to her.

He’s marble, untouched by the ages that have passed since last she saw him, and still as beautiful, still fills her heart with a love she could never quite quench and makes her hands ache with the urge to wrap them around his pretty pale throat.

She almost leaves, almost walks away and leaves him to rot, but she sees Liam in the line of his shoulder, Killian in the curve of his cheek. And she can’t.

She never means to wake him.

She tells him a hundred thousand stories. Tells him of the men she drowned and how she imagined his face on each one. Tells him how it felt to watch her baby swallowed up by lichen and weeds. Of the betrayal that still cuts like a knife every time she enters the room where he lies. But she tells him other things too. About how tears taste underwater, about how, after everything, all her dreams are still of him.

How she loves him still, even as she hates him with every fibre of her being.

She drops a kiss on his forehead one evening, an old habit long suppressed.

She never means to wake him. But she does.

And what else is there to do, but start again? True Love’s Kiss hanging over them, half curse, half benediction, and she wonders, not for the first time, how there can be fate without forgiveness.

He never asks for it. She couldn’t offer it if he did.

There’s another life on the land, far away from the ocean that still sings to her, where all they have is each other in a world that neither of them quite understand. 

He tells her that Killian died young, too far from the coast to return him to her, and he holds her as she weeps, apologies on his tongue and platitudes in his eyes. He’s all she has, so she lets them soothe her. Lets him in. What else is there to do, after all?

There’s another son, and time reverses. Her eyes, his hair, wide-eyed freckled innocence that makes her bones hurt for the wanting of her lost, lost boys. 

_Liam,_ Brennan says, and she can’t speak through the lump in her throat to say no.

Time reverses, and she never expected it. 

Not like this, not another betrayal, not another son crying for his mother as she faces down the man she loves. He doesn’t hide behind her sister this time, though she can see her written in the sharp twist of his mouth, in the way his steady hand points her own wand - long gone, she’d thought, gone with her magic to the place she never thinks of - at her heart.

She never expected it.

But she does.


	2. The Walls Come Tumbling Down

The storm comes on suddenly.

They haven’t been far, can't go far really without risking whatever befalls those who cross Storybrooke’s ocean boundary, but it's been a glorious day - late summer sunshine warm on their necks as Killian had given Henry the helm and come to lean over the guardrail with her, light sparkling over the breaking waves at the bow - so there's no warning for the sudden heave of the waves, or the way darkness falls thick like a blanket hours before it should.

Killian bolts for the helm, where Henry’s looking to the sky with a confused expression that shifts towards terror as a massive wave lifts the  _ Jolly Roger  _ clear from the sea and sends her slamming back down in a terrible crash of wood and surging waters. Rain begins to fall in sheets, obscuring the distant lights of the town and soaking through their light summer clothes.

Emma and Henry are both sent flying as the ship tilts and rolls, only Killian's death grip on the shuddering wheel keeping him upright. It reminds her of Neverland, of the mermaid’s curse and the burn of salt in her lungs, and she grabs Henry by the hood of his jacket and shoves him towards the hatch.

“Get below!” she yells over the screaming of the wind as she wraps a rope around her arm, her eyes already scanning the roiling water around them.

Henry, to his credit, only bites his lip, sparing a glance for Killian and then skidding towards the hatch and letting it slam closed behind him.

“You should join him!” Killian shouts. “This is no natural tempest, Swan!”

“You don't say!” She pushes her wet hair back from her face and glares into the encroaching darkness. “And I'm not leaving you alone up here!”

“A man can only ask!” He calls back, surprisingly cheerful, and she grits her teeth as she forces her way, rope by rope against the sway of the ship, to reach him.

“What do you think?” She asks breathlessly as she clings on to the railings closest to him. “Evil mermaids? Kraken? Moby Dick?”

“So many wonderful options,” he grunts, putting his whole body weight behind a half turn of the wheel. “Be a love, would you, and hoist the sails so we don't capsize before introductions are made?”

“Aye aye.”

She manages to disengage her arms from the railings by hooking her knees through them instead, leaving her in the bizarre position of lying flat on her back on the rolling deck, rain blinding her as she tries to channel her magic just right against the capstan.

At first she thinks it's a shadow, her eyes playing tricks on her, but then it moves, sinuous and sly, along the  _ Jolly Roger’ _ s spars, pausing to look down at them, it's head tilted as if considering their fate. She can't see a face, can't even tell if it's human, but she could swear she can see it smiling.

Lightning flashes, the figure’s shadow made huge and terrifying as it falls on the straining mainsail, and Emma hears Killian swear. A litany of terrible curses she's never even heard before.

There’s a crack, and a scream, and something like buzzing that she can feel right dow deep in her bones. And then, silence. 

 

* * *

She wakes to Henry, pale and suddenly looking very young, patting her face gently.

“Mom?” He says in a raw, frightened voice. “Mom can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” she says and then coughs, the word sticking in her throat. “Yeah I'm fine, what happened? Where's -”

“I'm here,” Killian’s voice is rough like her own, but hearing it is enough to alleviate some of the sudden crushing pain in her chest. “We’re all right.”

She swallows hard, pushing herself up onto her elbow, blinking in the bright, bright sunlight.

The bright, bright sunlight that had been noticeably absent a few minutes ago.

“What the hell happened?”

“Good question, that.” Killian sighs, sitting back on his heels and gesturing widely. “As you can see, it wasn’t my best approach.”

Emma sits up, lets her eyes adjust, and gasps out loud.

The  _ Jolly Roger _ lies at a listless angle, her port side banked up against the sandbar that protects Storybrooke’s harbour, crosstrees at unnatural angles, and her sails and rigging fluttering, ragged and useless, in the breeze. Killian rubs a hand over his beard in defeat.

“The poor girl’s had better days.”

“She’d have had worse if it wasn’t for us.”

Emma’s head snaps round at the sound of Blue’s voice, only to see her and a cluster of other nuns-turned-fairies-turned-nuns gathered at the end of the spit of land that the  _ Jolly  _ is miserably propped up against.

“You… helped?” she asks, her head still a little woolly from whatever knocked her out. Blue half smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

“Can’t have the Savior taken out by bad weather, can we?”

Killian’s jaw clenches, and he looks levels Blue with a suspicious glare.

“That was no natural squall, fairy, and you know it.”

“Nothing of consequence, I assure you.” Blue says, and Emma’s superpower flares into life. “But perhaps it would be best to keep off the water for a little while. Not,” she looks up at the battered  _ Jolly _ and lifts a perfect eyebrow, “that that should be much of a problem.”

Killian grimaces, turning his attention back to his poor half-wrecked ship, but Emma watches the other fairies, watches the furrows in their brows, and concentrates on the tingle of magic that runs down her spine and sets her superpower blaring.

Something’s up, all right.

She struggles to her feet, leaning hard on Henry’s shoulder as she struggles against the dizziness and the buzzing in her ears that won’t quite dissipate. “There was a… a thing. A person. Up in the rigging. What happened to them? What’s going on?”

Blue’s expression doesn’t change, but Emma can see the way the other fairies shift behind her, closing ranks around something dark and wet that she can’t quite make out.

“You’ve taken quite a bump to the head, Emma. Perhaps you should rest a little?”

Emma opens her mouth to protest even as another wave of dizziness sends her swaying on the spot, but with a wave of her wand Blue and the other fairies disappear in a flash of sparkling light.

“Mom?” Henry’s voice cracks slightly, and she forces herself to stand by her own power, her eyes fixed on the spot where the fairies had stood, “What’s going on?”

“Not a clue, kid. Not a damn clue.”

* * *

 

They gather in the cloister, pressed close together as if for warmth, little shoves and staggers sending ripples through the crowd as they fight to be furthest away from the body at Blue’s feet.

“Do you think they saw?” 

“What will we do with her?”

“The pirate must know - ”

Blue holds up her hand, and silence falls among the nervous, twittering hoard.

“It doesn’t matter. The pirate only knows of old legends, and Emma knows nothing at all. As long as we keep this between ourselves, there’s nothing to fear.”

“And her?” Tinkerbell asks, her arms folded tight across her chest, eyes more suspicious than scared,  “What  _ are _ you going to do with her?”

“Send her straight back, of course,” says Blue, with the confidence of a foregone conclusion.

Curled at her feet, her face pressed against her knees and her drenched hair, Davy Jones allows herself the smallest of smiles.

Solid ground feels good beneath her bones, the breeze on her skin as gentle and sweet as a lover’s caress, but she’s learned her lesson this time.

Vengeance is sweeter.


End file.
